Gearbox: Wii U is more powerful than current gen consoles

Aliens colonial marines wii uHere we go again: another day, another developer with comments on the power of the Wii U. This time, it’s Gearbox director Brian Martel, who’s the head of Aliens: Colonial Marines, saying that the Wii U is more powerful than the current generation consoles (the PS3 and Xbox 360). In an interview with Nintendo Gamer, Martel said:

“The machine itself will be one of the best-looking versions of the game, you know, because they’ve got more RAM than some of the other things. And you know, they’re late in the cycle so they’ve got this really great processor and all that kind of stuff.”

According to Martel, the Wii U has more RAM than current gen consoles, both of which have 512 MB of memory. Previous leaked Wii U specs hinted at the consoles packing 768 MB of RAM and a quad core CPU. With the extra horsepower under the hood, it’s no surprise that the Wii U version of Aliens: Colonial Marines will be the best looking one.

A few days ago, unnamed developers claimed that the Wii U wasn’t as powerful as the current gen consoles, which is a hard pill to swallow, no matter how you look at it. If that report was true, the developer most likely didn’t know how to tap into the power of the Wii U. Just days ago, Gearbox’ Randy Pitchford praised the Wii U, saying that “no other platform can do what the Wii U can do”, referring to its controller and hardware.

At this point, everyone can speculate about the Wii U hardware and what’s inside the console. If Nintendo chooses to disclose the hardware details, we’ll know. But honestly, we don’t expect Nintendo to publicly tout the Wii U specs, as the company isn’t known for doing that. However, it’s likely that developers will start disclosing the specs once everything goes public later this year.